Just six books in four years: Who is to blame?

Local authors and foreign donors fail to gel in implementing new curricula.

LAHORE: Four years since the German donor agency GTZ started to provide technical support to update school textbooks, just six new books have reached the market.

In 2007, Deutshe Gesellshaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) set up a resource centre in Lahore and other provincial capitals. The centres were meant to help the academic staff, authors, editors and subject specialists of the provincial textbook boards and the National Book Foundation in Islamabad to develop new textbooks that fit the National Textbook and Learning Material Policy (NTLM) 2007 and the 2006 curricula guidelines. GTZ had also helped develop the 2006 curricula guidelines.

Punjab Textbook Board (PTB) officials said that the resource centres did not provide the kind of assistance they needed. A GTZ spokesman said that they had provided plenty of training opportunities to those involved in developing textbooks, suggesting that the writers were just not good enough.

Apart from the six new textbooks that have reached the market, another 37 books have been issued no-objection certificates by the government and are to be published soon. The Provincial Review Committee (PRC), the body that approves new textbooks, has rejected 22 manuscripts for textbooks and had sent back another 25 for revision.

PTB officials said this was a very poor return after four years. The PTB office is five kilometres from the Lahore Resource Centre. Some members of the PTB’s academic staff felt that the centre had been more of a hindrance than help. They complained that the resource centre building was previously a PTB library with 5,000 rare books that were often used as references by textbook authors. “GTZ has built a library of new and irrelevant books that are of no help to the authors,” said one official.

Dr Fouzia Saleemi, former PTB chairwoman, said that she had implemented the 2002 curricula in two years during her tenure. She said that under her watch, around 100 textbooks for grades 1 to 12 had been developed in two years.

“Besides devising and implementing the curricula 2002 and developing textbooks, I made sure all the textbooks were available in the market,” she said. She said that she had engaged local professors and teachers in developing curricula and books.

She said GTZ had failed to adequately train the available human resource to develop textbooks under the new curricula. She said that it was a failure and suggested that the government rethink its policy of looking abroad for help in the education sector.

But GTZ Programme Officer Professor Muhammad Ali Shahid said the failure to develop new textbooks was not GTZ’s fault. “GTZ’s function is to facilitate textbook boards for the development of teaching and learning materials which include textbooks, workbooks, teachers’ manuals, supplementary reading material and other teaching and learning material as per the new curricula and textbooks policy,” he said.

He said that GTZ had so far held 25 capacity-building workshops for PTB academic staff, authors, PRC members and publishers to teach them modern techniques for developing textbooks and other learning materials. GTZ had renovated and furnished the PTB conference room to hold these workshops. It had given training to around 600 authors.

Prof Shahid said that no new textbook had come out of any resource centres except the one in Lahore.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 13^th, 2010.